How can Indian democracy allow the open oppression of Bengali-origin Muslims by Assam?

On September 12, Assam Police shot 19-year-old Haidar Ali dead in Assam’s Kamrup Metropolitan district because they claimed he had been part of a violent demonstration against an eviction drive. His family contended that Ali had no reason to protest the operation: their home was not among the hundreds of structures demolished because the authorities alleged they were unauthorised. On Wednesday, nonetheless, the Assam government’s bulldozers returned to destroy the family’s home.

The demolitions and shootings of Ali and another teenager in Kachutali village highlight the cruelty that characterises how the Assamese state treats its Bengali-origin Muslim residents.

As my colleague Rokibuz Zaman has reported, when the authorities demolished Muslim homes on September 9, three days before the two men was killed, there was no resistance. However, the authorities soon went back to the village, angered that the evicted families had left their possessions with their neighbours or on vacated land. Not only did the government want to demolish their homes, it wanted to banish these working-class people from the area.

This second action resulted in resistance from residents. The police opened fire, to deadly effect.

Outsider status

By now, such viciousness has become a regular feature in Assam. Government authorities move frequently to evict Bengali-origin Muslims from plots on which they are said to have occupied illegally – other communities rarely face such action. And when it comes to Bengali-origin Muslims, the police are trigger happy, opening fire to kill in a manner that would be unthinkable for another community in Assam.

Most Bengali-origin Muslims in Assam trace their origins to the time British colonial administrators settled peasants from Bengal in the region. Since then, the community has been the victim of xenophobic sentiment in Assam, victimised both for its ethnicity as well as its religion.

While Bengali-origin Muslims are, in the eyes of the census, Assamese speakers, they have been treated as quintessential outsiders in Assam’s century-long politics revolving around claims of indigenity. In 1983, in the wake of the Union government’s decision to award Bengali-origin Muslims the right to vote, a massacre took place in Nellei, claiming the lives of an estimated 2,000 people in a single day. It remains India’s deadliest pogrom.

So extreme was the hate against the community that amnesty for the killers was a part of the Assam Accord in 1985, the agreement between the Indian government and Assamese nationalist groups to end the violent Anti-Foreigners Agitation that had started in 1979.

Current-day attacks

Staring in 2013, Bengali-origin Muslims faced even greater challenges, when the Supreme Court ordered the updation of Assam’s National Register of Citizens. In a process that is unprecedented anywhere in the world, this involved the scrutinising the citizenship status of Assam’s residents, with a particular focus on its so-called non-indigenous communities. Over 19 lakh persons were left off the final list.

The xenophobic politics this sparked was powered by the rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party in both New Delhi and Assam. In the Bengali-origin Muslims, the BJP has found a punching bag that perfectly merges its Hindutva ideology with the state’s dominant Assamese nationalism.

In August, for example, the BJP demonstrated this when it weaponised the extra-judicial killing of a Bengali-origin Muslim man accused of rape. “So, is it true that @INCAssam is rolling out the red carpet, mobilising every corner of its vast ecosystem and loyal supporters, to defend their ‘star’ of the Dhing incident who finally faced the music today [August 24]?” the BJP’s said on social media. “Must be because he hails from a particular community, right?” It also attacked journalists who spoke against extra-judicial killings.

At the same time, Assamese nationalist groups issued an ultimatum for Bengali-origin Muslims to leave certain districts in Assam. In another district, Muslims were assaulted, allegedly on the orders of a BJP leader.

Open opression

India is no stranger to horrific violence against marginalised groups. However, in the case of Bengali-origin Muslims of Assam, their oppression is openly touted as a facet of state policy. Attacking them has become a feature of the state, not a flaw.

For example, when threats were issued to Muslim workers to leave some areas in August, Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma, rather than restoring law and order and implementing the Constitutional right of any Indian to live and work in any part of the country, blamed the community for becoming a threat to the state’s so-called indigenous communities. Soon after, he declared in the Assembly that he was partisan and did not represent Assam’s Bengali-origin Muslims.

So grave is the predicament of the Bengali-origin Muslim of Assam that the Opposition and even leaders of their own community do not stand by them. The killings during the Kachutali demolitions earlier this month, for example, resulted in almost no political criticism. On the other hand, if something similar had happened with any other community, it would have led to a political firestorm.

State failure

Most troublingly, even the judiciary seems to have abdicated its role in this sitution. Bengali-origin Muslim facing state violence have little recourse to the law. In fact, given the National Register of Citizens was driven by the Supreme Court itself, the judiciary can often be a part of the problem.

The Bengali-origin Muslim of Assam are a sizeable community, numbering close to a crore. They make up nearly a third of Assam’s population. In a democracy, this should count. However, their extreme poverty and marginalisation means that they have no voice in the corridors of power and oppression against them can continue unabated, at least in the short run.

In the long term, however, treating a community with such wanton cruelty is likely to be the recipe for political instability in the state of Assam.